Word on the street is that Congress may consider legislation to force our soldiers to pay to get Post-9.11 GI Bill benefits. Said benefits include four-year tuition-free education at a public college or university (or an equivalent tuition break at a private one) for all soldiers who a) serve three years active duty, b) serve extended active duty while on reserve, or c) get wounded while serving. If you're sitting at home wondering why it would be controversial to make soldiers pay for their benefits, please consider whether a), b), and c) might just constitute "payment." And if you're sitting at home sighing that deducting pay from a soldier's future paychecks is the kind of sacrifice they have to make to keep the Post-9.11 GI Bill program solvent, please consider why our politicians always ask the soldiers to sacrifice and never, say, defense contractors. If you fail to consider these things, please go ahead and slap yourself. The rest of us can use the tools in the upper right-hand corner of this page (or the bottom of this page, if you're on a cellphone) and call our Reps and Senators and tell them to do right by our troops.
Meanwhile, you've no doubt heard of the $100 billion-plus arms deal™ President Trump and the government of Saudi Arabia have planned -- but you may not have heard about H.R. 608/S. 532, the Stop Arming Terrorists Attack, which would prevent our federal government from "providing covered assistance" (i.e., money, intelligence, or weapons) to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, Tahrir al-Sham, or groups associated with them. By the looks of it, that sure would include nations like Saudi Arabia, which most certainly provides "covered assistance" to these corporations. Now, the bill would also require the Director of National Intelligence (or DNI) to determine who, exactly, falls under the bill's proscriptions -- and you can easily imagine a DNI simply "not finding" that Saudi Arabia has funded or helped terrorist groups. But forcing a DNI to ignore the plain truth for political reasons is not without its benefits -- the DNI would have to justify his findings every six months to Congress, made up of people who, at least nominally, represent our interests. So while you've got your Reps and Senators on the phone about soldiers' benefits, you can tell them to support the Stop Arming Terrorists Act as well.
Finally, if you've missed previous opportunities to tell your state legislators to support automatic voting registration, then USPIRG still helps you do that. Under laws like Oregon's 2015 automatic voting registration law, your state government would register you to vote every time you interact with a state agency -- most often your state motor vehicle division -- unless you go through the effort of opting out. Oregon's law seems to have helped voters under 30, as the share of those voters voting jumped 20 percentage points from 2012 (37%) to 2016 (57%). Those who would bemoan such a state of affairs, or who would complain that automatic voter registration will simply increase the number of Democratic voters, might want to reacquaint themselves with the whole one-person-one-vote thing. And folks who call automatic voter registration TEH MANDATORY REGISTRASHUNZ!!! might want to reacquaint themselves with the term "opt-out." And folks who call it "forced voting" really just need to stop fronting. And all of the above could also just figure out how to get more folks to vote the way they do! Persuasion: it's the world's oldest profession.
Comments